


Ingénue

by DWatson



Category: Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-16
Updated: 2015-01-16
Packaged: 2018-02-04 22:13:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1795018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DWatson/pseuds/DWatson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A cosmic fairy tale about the mystery of love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Once upon a time in New Mexico, a small marmalade kitten fell into a manhole and nearly drowned. It had come out into the human world ill-prepared, with nothing but its feline curiosity and child-like good faith.

No one had seen the kitten fall. It was nobody’s pet, and if it had a family somewhere, it must have wandered far, far away from them, for there was no one around to fret over it, or fish it out of the sewer, or to call for help when the kitten started drowning. It was only by a small miracle that a little girl on her way back from school picked up its feeble distress call. She descended down the rusty metal ladder, straight into the dirt and the slime, without a second thought.

The girl took the kitten home, where she gave it a good scrub, a large bowl of milk and a name it would keep for the rest of its days. She called him Mr. Whiskers. The girl’s name was Mary Lou.

Some years later, another stray came into Mary Lou’s life under a similar set of circumstances. He called himself Thomas Jerome Newton and told her he had come from England, though his real home was, in fact, much farther away.

Mr. Newton and Mr. Whiskers had a complicated relationship, mostly owing to the fact that Mr. Whiskers wanted absolutely nothing to do with people who were not Mary Lou. Ironically, Newton shared the sentiment. As far as he was concerned, human nature was an enigma, whereas cats reminded him of home (though no such creature existed there), and so he couldn’t help regarding Mr. Whiskers with a certain degree of fondness, even if the feeling was not reciprocated—which it wasn’t.

Mary Lou and Mr. Whiskers had a private world all of their own. Their bonding ritual usually took place in the evenings. Newton observed it out of the corner of his eye, trying his best not to look like the Peeping Tom that he essentially was. For hours, Mr. Whiskers would lay prone in Mary Lou’s lap, as she stroked his back and told him all about her day. From time to time, he’d meow or rawr, as if in agreement, or commiseration, though most of the time, his only contribution to the dialog was a continuous rumbling noise somewhat reminiscent of an idling car engine. And so it went, day after day, evidently, to both his and her delight. They were such an odd match, Mary Lou and her feline friend, and yet they seemed to fulfill each other’s needs perfectly.

Then, one night, Mr. Whiskers went to sleep and never woke up. Cats, as Newton learned the following morning, only had one life, after all, and it was even shorter than that of a human.

Mary Lou seemed to have taken it well at first. If anything, she did the housework with even more vigor than usual. First she vacuumed the carpets and mopped all the floors, then washed the windows and soaked the drapes, and, finally, did both the dirty dishes and quite a few that seemed perfectly clean to begin with. At noon, Newton found her at the dining table, tucking Mr. Whiskers into a decoupage shoebox, along with his favorite plaid blanket and a frizzy ball of red yarn that looked for all the world like a war veteran.

“Mrs. Adams from church is letting me bury him in her backyard,” she explained. “Some people just leave them in the dumpster, but I could never do that to Mr. Whiskers.”

Newton bit his lip. He felt as though he should say something. Looking at Mary Lou’s handiwork, the quaintly decorated and entirely overstuffed makeshift kitty coffin, the only thing that came to mind was: _I think maybe you should get a bigger box_. He hadn’t said it because the entire getup fell apart at the seams before Mary Lou had a chance to close the lid. The plaid blanket spilled over the split sides of the box, the ball of yarn rolled off the table unspooling itself in the process, and then Mr. Whiskers was the only thing that remained firmly, and stiffly, in its place.

“Ooooh,” Mary Lou whimpered. Her face scrunched up like a discarded tin can. “I wish we had a pet cemetery around here.”

Newton retired to the hallway and made a couple of phone calls. It turned out that the nearest pet cemetery was 80 miles away. At 30 miles an hour, it took almost three hours to drive there. It took Mary Lou another hour and a half to pick out a casket. For Newton, it was an exercise in keeping his anxiety in check. He didn’t like the aura of the place. It reeked, simultaneously, of death and profit. To make matters worse, Mary Lou demanded his opinion on every little feature, as though he were the one she was burying in the thing. _Pine or Oak? Golden frost or dark walnut? ‘Faithful Friend’ or ‘Paws Rest’_? He didn’t care. All he saw was dead wood fashioned into containers for dead animals; a tragic waste of perfectly good trees, all in all.

The actual burial lasted considerably less, to none of Newton’s relief. He realized, as Mr. Whiskers was being lowered into the ground, that the reason the whole affair had upset him so had little to do with the waste of trees, or the commercialization of grief—though he certainly held that such practices were unworthy of a civilized society. In the end, it was the anticipation of the inevitable that made him ill at ease. He had known all along that Mary Lou was eventually going to break down and start crying, and didn’t want to be around when it happened.

He was, though. She wept on his shoulder all the way back home.

That night, as Newton stood at the window watching the trains pass by with a wistful melancholy that was quickly becoming a permanent fixture of his emotional landscape, Mary Lou sneaked up and wrung her arms around his waist. The shock could have sent Newton clawing his way up the curtain, all the way to the plastic hooks, had she not clamped down on him hard enough to make any attempt at resistance futile. Then, having ensured his cooperation, she planted a kiss on the back of his neck, and—it may have been his imagination—but her hold on him loosened into something almost familiar. Something that tickled his deepest needs, ones he did not dare hope would be satisfied anytime soon.

“Thank you so much,” she cooed in his ear. “You’re such a kind man.”

And then, just as swiftly, she was gone, leaving Newton to his trains and his melancholy, and an unnerving chill on his back, where her body had been pressed against his.


	2. Chapter 2

Life with Mary Lou was pleasantly uneventful. Her apartment may have been a drab little bedroom-and-a-half condo with leaking pipes and peeling paint on rickety chairs and tables, but Newton felt more comfortable in it than he had at the Waldorf Astoria. The place was clean enough, despite the decrepit state of it, and Mary Lou turned out to be a talented cook, when she wasn’t actively trying to fatten him up. In a short while, she had become a sort of a universal aide to Newton, doing everything from ironing his shirts to helping him organize the ever-growing mountains of WE paperwork that constantly threatened to overtake their living space. On Sunday mornings, she went to church. Several times, she even managed to persuade her poltergeist lodger to come along and, supposedly, learn the meaning of existence in weekly installments.

(The only thing Newton learned during the services was that he was an astonishingly untalented singer.)

Sometimes, Mary Lou would want to stay after the service, to mingle with grumpy pensioners and giggling housewives, for whom the color of Newton’s hair remained a source of infinite amusement. Week after week, they inquired, ostensibly jokingly, when they might expect a wedding invitation in the mail. Once Newton mentioned that he was already married, and quite happily so, Mary Lou never asked him to go to church with her again.

“Mr. Farnsworth called,” she said one evening, over dinner. “When you were in the shower.”

Newton, who had spent that weekend immersed in books on Greek mythology, looked up to find Medusa herself sitting across from him. Cautiously, he swallowed a half-chewed bite of trout and washed it down with some white wine. “Did he leave a message?”

“He said he found a designer for your house. Some Japanese guy.”

It wasn’t that Mary Lou had actually grown snakes out of her scalp, of course, but if a look could turn to stone… Newton nodded his acknowledgment, and casually went back to mashing the boiled potato in his plate in an attempt to feign nonchalance.

“You’re moving out?” Mary Lou asked.

“In a couple of months, yes.”

“Where to?”

“The country.”

She threw back what was left of her gin-tonic. “Is your wife coming over?”

Newton put his cutlery down. He hadn’t planned on telling Mary Lou about the house before the construction was finished, or, at the very least, started, but now that the surprise was ruined, he figured he might as well come right out and say it.

“Actually,” he said, “I was wondering if maybe you’d want to come live with me there.”

Mary Lou set her empty glass down with a loud _thud_. Her face began to brighten up in some indescribable way, and Newton, certain now that he was saying the right thing, added: “I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have as my housekeeper.”

And then the ghost of the affable Mary Lou once again vanished without a trace. “Housekeeper,” she repeated flatly.

Newton nodded. “You did say you’ve always wanted to live in the country.”

As silence stretched between them, thick and awkward, and more deafening than all of Mary Lou’s usual chatter, Newton realized, with a certain degree of unease, that he had never expected her to say anything other than _yes_. What he eventually got instead was a rather lukewarm “I’ll think about it, Tommy.”

After dinner, Newton found himself rummaging through the kitchen for something to drink. Initially, he had planned on fixing himself a cup of green tea with milk and a few drops of lemon juice, a combination that was, judging by the scowls it had earned him for waiters in the past, evidently not enjoyed by anyone else on the whole of planet Earth. A set of beautiful Chinese teacups ordered from a small antique shop in New York had just arrived that morning. Newton had looked forward to drinking from the eggshell porcelain, to feeling the delicate relief of the hand-painted woodland creatures beneath his fingers, and deciphering the _hanzi_ at the bottom of each cup. The craftsmanship was exquisite, each piece in the set unique in some subtle way that could only be revealed by a careful side-by-side examination. But such things deserved a ceremony, and Newton, in the mood he was in that evening, simply had no heart to put in it. Instead, he reached for the bottle of Beefeater gin (sitting faithfully on the kitchen counter at all hours of day and night), and poured himself a generous helping in a 50 cent highball glass entirely identical to the hundreds, if not thousands, of its conveyer belt siblings sitting in cupboards across America.

He took a sip. The gin burned his throat like liquid fire. Mary Lou had warned him about spirits: _They taste kind of yucky at first, but they grow on you_. If that was the case, the taste of straight gin had certainly not finished growing on Newton. Fortunately, the side effects were pleasant enough to compensate for that.

In the living room, _Gone With the Wind_ blared from seven television sets all tuned to the same channel: _“_ _Don’t start flirting with me.”_ Rhett Butler said. _“I’m not one of your plantation beaux. I want more than flirting from you._ _“_

Newton mouthed a few words of the dialog here and there. He knew the entire script by heart, even though he never particularly cared for the story.

“ _What do you want?“_

“ _I’ll tell you, Scarlett O’Hara, if you’ll take that Southern-belle simper off your face.”_

And then there was one unexpected line of dialog from a weary voice belonging to neither Clark Gable nor Vivian Leigh: “Why?”

Newton looked over his shoulder to find Mary Lou standing in the doorway. “I beg your pardon?”

“Why me?”

He frowned. “Because I need you.”

“No,” she muttered. “You don’t need _me._ What you need is a maid. Anyone would do.”

There was no bitterness in her tone, at least none that Newton could detect. Just disappointment, though for what reason, he couldn’t fathom. He did not understand the question. Why her? Why _not_? Who else was there? Behind him, Mary Lou stepped a little deeper into his personal space.

“With the kind of money you’re giving me, you could pay an army to look after you.“

Newton set his glass on the counter. He could see the bright, warm colors of Mary Lou’s sundress reflected in the wall tiles in front of him. For some reason, he found it difficult to turn around and look her in the eye. Was that what people called embarrassment? And what was he embarrassed about, anyway?

“I don’t want an army, Mary Lou,” he said. “I want you.”

Mary Lou laid her hand on his shoulder blade. “If you really want me,” she said, “why don’t you take me?”

“Take you where?”

“Don’t joke around!” She yanked him by the shoulder to make him turn and face her. Newton winced, not so much from pain, but in startled surprise. Mary Lou may have lacked sophistication, but it was unlike her to stoop down to manhandling. She must have realized she had crossed a line, though, because her anger mellowed out almost instantly, and she took his face in her hands with a gentleness that spoke of regret.

“Come on, Tommy,” she purred, “you can’t be that dumb.” Up close, her dull eyes acquired depth of color, a dozen sparkling shards of chocolate, olive and hazel. She gave him a peck on the cheek, then the nose, then the other cheek.

“I love you,” she said _._ “You know that, right?”

Newton stared at her as though she had just grown a second head. _Of course_ he had known, living, as he was, in a perpetual state of déjà vu. And now that she had not only confessed to her love, but practically shoved it in his face, what choice did he have but to acknowledge it? But he never gave it any serious thought, never considered _doing_ anything about it. Now he felt as though agency was taken from him anyway. Mary Lou pressed on, and when her bare knee grazed the inside of his leg, he had to reach back and clutch the counter top just to keep his bearings. They shared a breath that reeked of gin, and then, to Newton’s mounting stupefaction, a kiss that felt just as heady.

In the living room, Rhett Butler and Scatlett O’Hara continued their own overwrought mating ritual: _“_ _No, I don’t think I will kiss you._ _Although, y_ _ou need kissing, badly._ _T_ _hat’s what’s wrong with you. You should be kissed and often. And by someone who knows how.”_

Newton’s legs began to sag under him. His heart hammered in his chest with equal parts anxiety and arousal, and he wondered, not for the first time, whether the whole thing was nothing but a fever dream—the money, the limo, the patents, Farnsworth and Arthur, and this dingy little kitchen where Mary Lou held him pinned and mounted like a butterfly. It was all too much, and he was probably lying passed out in a gutter with a single twenty dollar bill clutched in his hand, having never made it far from that double-dealing pawn shop where he earned his first American money. He reached, blindly, for something, a straw to keep from drowning in that nightmarish vision of failure, and Mary Lou took his hands and pressed them to her waist instead. Whether it was him or her that knocked his drink off the counter in the process, the frenzy ended abruptly when the glass shattered at their feet.


	3. Chapter 3

Mary Lou sat on the hardwood dining table, recounting stories of playground injuries and drinking warm gin straight out of the bottle. Her bloody foot rested on a towel in Newton’s lap, under 200 watts of light pouring out of a novelty pendant, modeled after a flying saucer, of all things.

Newton’s trousers had shielded him from the barrage of shattered glass, but Mary Lou with her sundress and flip-flops had not been as fortunate. He picked glass shards out of her skin with a pair of long, sharp tweezers, taking care not to cause her any further pain. Not that it seemed as though she felt much of anything at that point, anyway; the gin was almost entirely vanquished.

“…and then, when I was nine, I fell off the roof and broke my arm. I think mom and dad were out bowling, or something. I had to walk two miles to the ambulance, cause we didn’t have a phone back then. We didn’t have a camera, either, which is a shame, cause you could see the bones sticking out and everything! I kept the X-ray, though. All my friends at school wanted to see it.”

Newton winced at the thought, but didn’t attempt to change the subject. Gruesome open fractures may not have been his favorite thing to hear about, but they certainly made him less uncomfortable than discussing what transpired between the two of them in the kitchen would have.

“I guess that was the really big one,”Mary Lou continued. “I should have saved that one for last.” But, as it turned out, there were quite a few more stomach-churning injuries left on her check list. Sprained ankles, chaffed knees, firecracker accidents—Newton was starting to wonder how she even survived into adulthood with such neglectful parents.

“Took me 20 years to figure out I’m supposed to drink this stuff, instead of rubbing it on wounds!”

She went quiet after draining the last remains of gin, and in silence, it would not leave Newton alone—the memory of that frantic rush of blood he felt when she kissed him. It had all the characteristics of a panic attack, save for the fact that it was not entirely unpleasant. Like the first time he got drunk on wine, and felt the buzz of danger inherent in such cheap gratification.

Out of the corner of his eye, he observed Mary Lou’s hands clutching the side of the table, and saw, every now and then, her nails digging into the wood.

“Are you in pain?” he asked.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” was Mary Lou’s delayed, non-sequitur reply.

Newton looked up at her face.

“Kissed you, I mean.”

He fixed his stare back on her shin, where he had just picked what he hoped was the final missing piece of the glass out of a particularly nasty cut. “Pass the iodine, please.”

Mary Lou handed him the small brown bottle, her nose wrinkled in disgust. “I hate that stuff,” she said. But when Newton applied the solution, her reaction was little more than a rather unenthusiastic ow. He took a piece of gauze, soaked it in a bowl of warm water and wiped the dried blood off her toenails. Then he unwrapped a bandage roll and began to dress her ankle, where crimson spots gleamed in clusters like a star map rendered in flesh.

“D'you think we could forget what happened back there?” she said.

He said nothing, but his silence was an answer in itself.

Mary Lou sighed. “I didn’t think so.”

The remainder of Newton’s medical intervention went by in awkward silence, not helped in the least by the fact that he had to unwind the dressing three times before he managed to properly wrap it around Mary Lou’s ankle. Once he was finished, she wriggled her toes, as though to make sure he hadn’t cut off her circulation.

“So are we done, then?” she said, and Newton recognized, without having to be told, that she wasn’t talking about the dressing. Those five simple words were Mary Lou’s final ultimatum, and they forced him to confront the reality of his absurd predicament. For so long he had been nothing but a cosmic puppet, a facsimile of a human being with no personal needs or desires. Now, awoken with a kiss like a fairy tale heroine, he realized that he had come to depend on Mary Lou for more than just practical assistance. It was her very presence that mattered the most to him, the fact that, unlike countless other people he had encountered on his journeys, she looked on him like a fellow creature, and not a walking sack of hundred dollar bills. That was why he had allowed her, however reluctantly, to penetrate his lonely existence, and now there was no going back to rented rooms with nothing but the telly to talk to. Not even if the terms of their engagement would have to be renegotiated.

They believed he had the strength to endure solitude, the people back home. They were wrong.

Things changed after that day, and Mary Lou swiftly became Newton’s constant companion wherever he went. At sundown, they walked hand in hand on the edge of town, where abandoned houses stood dull and shabby against the raw beauty of the desert. In the back of his limo, he watched America’s colorful expanse unfold from the comfort of her embrace. Even in New York’s traffic, on his dreadfully long business trips, her presence made the noisy, angular world outside the tinted glass seem less formidable.

She was his refuge, Mary Lou—and his protection. War bride and white knight rolled into one bubbly package. Everything she did, she did for him. For them. Even when she went out to get her hair done, she would come back carrying matching bathrobes, and electric toothbrushes, and cushions in every imaginable shape and size. It made Newton feel a bit like a little bird sleeping inside an eggshell, as the metaphorical twigs and grass of 20th century consumerism came together to form a cozy nest around him. But in his eggshell, he continued to dream of a barren place where the wind was white with sand; of a woman whose eyes were sorrow, suspended like a fossil in a sphere of golden amber. In his small town American life, overflowing with creature comforts of every description, there was no apple pie that could ever hope to fill the gaping hole inside him where his sense of belonging used to reside.

After all, nostalgia was the real American Dream, and Newton, like all exiles, had it in abundance.


	4. Chapter 4

The house was finished by the end of Spring. Newton was pleased with the result. There was lots of shade, lots of privacy, and, most importantly, no stairs or sharp edges to bump into. Best of all, he owned the lake, and all the thousands of gallons of water in it. It was ludicrous.

The first thing Mary Lou did once they were left alone there was to strip and jump in. Newton sat on the jetty with his legs dangling over the edge, in his orthopedic shoes and his long sleeved shirt, buttoned all the way to his chin, feeling like an actor who had stumbled onto the wrong movie set.

“Come on in,” she shouted. “The water’s great!”

The refracted image of her naked body wobbled hypnotically beneath the surface. Newton caught himself staring, and quickly averted his gaze.

Mary Lou swam closer to him in broad, elegant strokes. “You’re not embarrassed, are you? There’s nobody around for miles!”

Newton cranked up his photo gray lenses to the darkest setting. He had seen her naked before, and with little fanfare, but not ever since they embarked on a romance. And even Newton, in all his bewildered cluelessness, realized there was something rather backwards about that.

“I’m not a very good swimmer,” he said.

Mary Lou grinned a wide, toothy grin. “You can hold onto me,” she said. “I won’t let you drown.” She reached up and clasped her hand around his ankle. “Don’t you trust me?”

Newton’s gaze drifted over the horizon to the pine forest on the opposite side of the lake. It was right to settle here, in the privacy of this watery woodland, where every nook and cranny, above the ground and below, brimmed with life. He could hear it all—from the flapping of a hawk’s wing, intent on something on the ground below, to the rustle of tiny insect legs on baby pond weed. And buzzing just above the surface of the lake, hundreds of dragonflies whose iridescent wings glimmered in the blood orange sun. Newton felt his heart swelling in his chest. There was beauty all around him, so exotic and profuse, he could scarcely contain his awe. He looked at Mary Lou, still clinging to his leg with a bony, pale hand, so much like his own, and, before he could think twice about it, answered her question with another question.

“Would you like to make love tonight?”

Mary Lou stared at him blankly for a long moment, then burst into a fit of laughter. Newton deflated like a pricked balloon. Had he made a mistake in asking? And how else was he supposed to know? He watched, befuddled, as she climbed out of the lake and settled next to him on the jetty.

“Why are you laughing?” he said.

“Why am I laughing?” she repeated, wringing the water out of her soggy hair. “Jesus, Tommy, I thought you’d never ask, is why I’m laughing.”

Newton’s eyebrows met with his hairline, as comprehension dawned on him. “Oh.”

He made it a point not to drink beforehand, for fear of dulling his mind and his senses. This decision did not have a positive effect on his nerves, and it was with a trembling hand that he fastened the knot on his bathrobe and opened the door separating him from Mary Lou. Dressed in next to nothing, she knelt on an oriental quilt, bathing in scented candlelight, like a picture card straight out of European erotic cinema. Newton had done extensive research to prepare himself for the task, obviously, but no matter how straightforward it had all seemed from an intellectual standpoint, once he found himself being devoured by Mary Lou’s entirely unabashed gaze, he suddenly lost all confidence in his sexual acumen. Part of him wanted to grind the whole thing to a halt and back peddle into the safety of platonic relations, but it was, as they said, now or never, to be or not to be, and a thousand other worn out idioms that did nothing to describe the awkward mix of conflicting instincts brewing in his gut.

“I can’t seem to get dry,” he said, just to have something to say. “I’m still wet.”

With a flick of her hand, Mary Lou rendered him free from his bathrobe. Guided by her arms, Newton crawled into bed and impressed a sloppy kiss on the spot where her ribs merged into the breastbone. The pattern of her heartbeat pulsed against his mouth, every bit as frantic as the hammering in his own chest. He took comfort in that, and in the fact that she had already forgiven him flaws and eccentricities that extended far beyond possibly being a lousy lover. Her gentleness and patience peeled away his uncertainties. Everything he asked for, she allowed, and he allowed her to do anything she wanted to him in return. It took him back to a time and a place where life had been simpler, and he could afford to lose himself in someone and not worry what would happen if he never got found again.

He wanted, very badly, to recapture that feeling somehow. There was no helping it. All his life, he had been loved and cherished, and then, all of a sudden, found himself completely alone in a strange land, millions of miles away from everyone and everything he ever cared about. Out of all the candidates—and there had been plenty—he had never thought _he_ would be the one chosen for this martyrdom. Oh, he had attended the classes and the training, had made studying human beings and their economy his life’s work. But up until the very end, he had quietly held on to hope that, when the day came, someone else would get saddled with the burden of responsibility, so that he could stay behind with a clear conscience, and watch his daughters grow. He supposed it was selfish on his part, but then again, to have the lives of every man, woman and child on his planet, as well as those of the future generations, hang in the balance of his actions, with no one to seek help or comfort from… well, Jesus Christ himself might have stumbled in his resolve.

Mary Lou didn’t know about any of that, but Newton knew that she would have to come to know of it eventually. That much he owed her, for better or worse.

In the afterglow, he lay on his back like a doll whose strings had been severed, listening to Mary Lou giggle some nonsense about carpets not matching drapes. He could not remember the last time he felt so exhausted. His hips ached, his muscles were sore, and he was fairly certain his internal organs collapsed to the pit of his stomach at one point. Mary Lou, by contrast, seemed to suffer no such side effects. She lay sideways on the bed with her head on his flank, playing with parts of him he still didn’t fully understand or know how to cope with. All he knew was that he wanted to make love to her again. And again.

“Was this your first time?” Mary Lou said. “I mean, after your wife.”

“Yes.”

“Was she your first?”

“Yes.”

“That’s so sweet.”

 _Is it_ , Newton thought. Where he came from, it was just normal. He wondered what his wife would have to say to him now, whether she, too, was lying in someone else’s arms, somewhere across the universe, having abandoned all hope of ever seeing him again. Part of him hoped she was.

“The first boy I slept with dumped me the next day,” Mary Lou said. “Bobbie Krieger, the ninth grade love of my life. Said I took it all too seriously, and that he just wanted to have a little fun. It wasn’t much fun for me, though. He just stuck it in, and in five seconds, it was over. And it hurt. And he didn’t care.”

Newton took her hand in his and kissed her open palm, not knowing a more appropriate way to extend his sympathy. Compared to that, he had to admit, he had _had_ it easy on both of his first times. It startled him a little when Mary Lou bolted up and bent over him with that frighting intensity in her eyes, the kind she usually reserved for people who mistreated their pets in her presence.

“People can be so cruel. They use you up, and then, when don’t need you any more, they just throw you away like… well, like a broken toy.” She sighed, and her face mellowed into a mask of resigned melancholy. “I never get used to that.”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to,” Newton said.

Mary Lou reached down to caress his cheek. “I wish it had been you,” she said. “I wish it had been like this.“

The gesture filled Newton with tenderness. Most of the time, he did not understand what was in Mary Lou’s mind, and supposed she did not understand what was in his either. But, like the late Mr. Whiskers, he understood well enough what her heart yearned for, because his yearned for the same thing.

“Come here,” he said, pulling her down by the shoulder. They settled into a tangled embrace that gained in closeness what it sacrificed in comfort. The last thing Newton heard before he drifted into a peaceful slumber was Mary Lou whispering against his lips.

“My sweet baby. I’m so glad I found you.”

With the last of his strength, he clung to her like the dew holds onto the grass.


End file.
